Like all things, you fucked up my funeral.
I wanted cremation. I wanted to be reduced. To go up in flames — a giant glowing plume, a rush of hot, acrid, bone-sweating erasure. Something dramatic and harsh, a last hurrah, yet with a wholesome dust-to-dust energy. Regardless of the theatrics, it was all we could afford.
But you sprung for the giant, yawning marble casket. I looked like a caricature of myself amongst the plush red pillows that cushioned my departure. You put me on full display, sloppily stitched wounds and pale reconstituted skin, my eyes like craters weighed down with exhaustion. It was a different sort of theatrics.
I could feel the stares and hear the groans as everyone looked at me in my eternal bed, propped up at the front of the funeral parlor like a prized pig. Their last memory of me was sullied, my life reduced to the cartoonish image of a corpse that would be forever seared into their minds — my ugliness immortalized. There was a spur-of-the-moment mob mentality that compelled them to genuflect in front of me like I was a crucified Christ. They touched my cold feet and the brave ones kissed my stone lips. You just sat there, stretching out in the leg room of the front row, and watched.
The whole performance of grief makes me sick, carefully exuding tears and joy and psychosis in appropriate measure. No one wants to claim that they made the rules, but everyone's watching to make sure you follow them. No one wants to grieve, but everyone’s a critic. No one wants to die, but we all want to kill ourselves.
Maybe you were just calling it out, breaking the charade. Or maybe you were just an asshole.
I didn’t want a religious service, no cryptic, ritualistic words that only a god would understand. I wanted it to be personal. I wanted crying, wailing stories, holes of loss active and gaping. My dead ego needed the after-the-fact validation. But what I got was an aseptic recitation of my supposed qualities and achievements, some flaccid funeral director I’d never met reading my resume for the attendants. You waved your right to lionize me, so my worth evaporated as swiftly as the rotting roses were dropped into my grave.
There was no chance of it being personal anyway when the guest list was completely customized for your benefit, chosen the way birthday invites or a wedding party were selected, just assembling the people who would be the most fun. You invited your friends, thinking I’d give a shit whether they were there or not, people I had never met but only heard about from carelessly nostalgic stories. Your family was there, all your crazy distant relatives that I hated. But my side was noticeably empty of any friends or family. An accurate depiction, true to a lonely life, but next to your bustling, performatively-mourning crowd, it made me look pathetic.
Speaking of flowers.
I wanted orchids. I loved the way they reach high like a spindly arm, so much stem before the payoff of bloom. I died still searching for the metaphor in those soft, blood-flecked petals, but regardless, they were my favorite flower and you should have known that. I’m sure I told you. But again, you shirked the responsibility. You let someone — one of the many ‘someones’ who miraculously take care of the little piddly shit when someone dies — call the flower shop, ask for dozens of cheap red roses, and snip off their thorns as I rolled over in my literal grave.
How was I to guess at your grief, or likewise measure your ineptitude? Can I blame your sadness? Do I believe in it? Were you afraid? Ashamed? Numb? Was it devastation or catatonia? How does one distinguish paralysis from apathy?
I should have known, should have been on the lookout for an indication that in the event of my death you’d be terrible. Every birthday that went by without celebration. Every thoughtless Christmas present picked randomly off of a sales rack at 10PM on Christmas Eve. Every night spent stifling my tears in the sheets as you snored next to my body.
If anyone had asked you to describe me, the one with whom you had chosen to align yourself, you couldn’t do it. You didn’t know me. I was no more to you than the shell that I felt like regardless. Your callousness only further hollowed me.
You buried me in your hometown, in a hole in the dirt between two old strangers. I wanted to be hucked into the mountains, dropped into a lake, blown into the winds of some place known only by its coordinates. I wanted to dissolve into the earth. I didn’t want to be able to be visited, stepped upon. Some stone etched with generic words and a graying photograph to mark my truncated life. I didn’t want anyone to know my birthday, let alone my death day. I didn’t want to give you a reminder.
In a grave, in the ground, in the mud, I was stuck. Trapped. You could have at least given me a grave bell so I could fuck with the townie kids who traipsed through the cemetery in the night. Let me be a ghost. Let me haunt anyone but you.
Brittney Uecker is a librarian and writer living in rural Montana who writes all lengths of fiction and dabbles in poetry and CNF. Her work has been published by Stone of Madness Press, Misplacement Magazine, FeverDream Magazine, and others. Lately, she has been exploring the theme of perilous overabundance and the mess of characters' emotional hunger.
